According to Variety, America’s Soprano Renée Fleming is poised to conquer new worlds of entertainment. Not content to rest on her laurels as diva, scent entrepreneur, dessert namesake and single working mother, Fleming has signed with talent agency Paradigm who promise to “scout out opportunities in thesping, endorsement, publishing and digital media” for the artist “with the…
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La Cieca is not at her happiest dishing a librettist; I mean their dreary overshadowed inkstained lives are already punishment enough, right? But still, it gets under your doyenne’s skin more than a bit to hear Terry Teachout‘s blogging self-aggrandizement at the expense of one of the greats of English literature. Teachout is, as well…
The ideal match of subject matter to critic: the role debut of Teddy Tahu Rhodes in Billy Budd, as reviewed by Anthony Tommasini. (“On being pressed into service, Billy is made a foretop man, and repeatedly throughout the performance Mr. Rhodes climbs up and down rigging with abandon, sometimes using only his arms.”)
British composer Keith Burstein, who ran up legal costs of £67,000 defending a test-case libel action, has been told he must declare bankruptcy if he wants to continue pursuing the case in a higher court. The libel complaint stems from critic Veronica Lee‘s review of Burstein’s opera, Manifest Destiny, performed at the Edinburgh Festival in August…
The cabaret show “Viva la Diva,” directed by Our Own JJ and starring Dorothy Bishop, has been booked for an additional performance this week as part of the Pillowfight Theatre Festival. The show goes on at 9:00 p.m. on July 3 at The Green Room at 45 Bleecker. Tickets are $25 at the door. Already…
Members of the cher public indigenous to the District of Columbia and its environs will welcome Anne Midgette as music critic for the Washington Post, as leaked this morning on Ionarts. In fact, Midgett’s full-time appointment is good news on a national scale, given the media’s current scary cutbacks in arts coverage. The scribe’s current…
Those muckraking scamps over at Opera News are at it again, quoting a in their June issue a particularly inflammatory passage from the mad gay diaries of mad gay Cecil Beaton. Dear Cecil, you will recall, designed the Met’s celebrated 1961 production of Turandot that starred Birgit Nilsson. It seems that mere critical and popular…
New York-centric as she is, La Cieca cannot help but sulk when she hears that the Met is in line for Nicholas Hynter‘s “rather limited” staging of Don Carlo that opened last night at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.Â
Rupert Christiansen writes a review that might be a rave, or, then again . . . In the small role of the minister Arbace, a confident young British tenor currently based in Hamburg suggested that he is ready to give Bostridge a run for his money: Benjamin Hulett, clearly a name to watch out for.
[This article originally appeared in the print zine precursor to this site, one of a series of surveys of live recordings by critic Leila de Lakmé.] Leyla Gencer. The very name is exotic. She was an artist of Turkish ancestry who, during the 1950s and 60s, held her own despite the presence of Maria Callas,…
. . . much to our dismay, we caught a glimpse of high-C-flaunting Juan Diego Florez coming out of the Juilliard School’s Meredith Wilson Residence Hall with fiance Julia Trappe in tow at around, oh, 1pm. That’s like 30 minutes before curtain! Little sister Counter Critic goes to the movies and gets a surprise preview.…
According to a review by Vivien Schweitzer in this morning’s NYT, the staid old Metropolitan Opera introduced a rather startling new plot element into their current revival of Entführung aus dem Serail:
In all the publicity surrounding last week’s memorials to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a far more put-upon martyr has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media. Celebrated freedom fighter Franco Zeffirelli is making veiled suggestions (through a “friend”) that, should the Met mothball such “masterpieces” as his 20-year-old Tosca production, supporters of the octogenarian…
Little Stevie reports on last night’s “danger carpet” incident during the Met’s Tristan:
“Marcello Giordani, in the title role, sounded at one moment like an important tenor and at others like an imperfect work in progress.” Bernard Holland, March 19, 2008. “The young tenor Brian Hymel, a very acceptable work in progress, sang ‘La donna è mobile” from Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’.” Bernard Holland, March 8, 2008
It used to be that us li’l online scribblers tried our best to imitate big-time print writers like James McCourt or Ethan Mordden. But now it seems, everyone wants to be bloggy. And since you asked, yes, La Cieca does have an example. Here’s Justin Davidson doing his best impression of Opera Chic!
Though La Cieca must say she can’t quite figure out whether the critic liked Gary Lehman‘s performance or not… “. . . Lehman has navigated quite well to date through persistently volatile and challenging financial markets, the sharp market wide decline in valuations across numerous asset classes, tight global liquidity conditions, and the strong headwinds…
Well, actually, yes, now you do. The New York Times is no longer the only major metropolitan daily whose music critic drools all over opera singers of the masculine persuasion. La Cieca is delighted to introduce the verbal stylings of David Mermelstein, who apparently is that gay man who has heretofore been trapped inside the…
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: March 9, 3:30 PM: After only 30 hours and on only the third try (or perhaps fourth, depending on how often you refresh the page), the New York Times has managed to report accurately the personnel and repertoire of a single selection at a concert that took place three days ago:Â
Better to say “greatest misses,” La Cieca thinks, though even that phrase is flawed by a nearly Hollandaise level of inaccuracy. The errors and gaffes of the flannel-eared Times critic are surely too many and too egregious for one writer to anthologize; certainly they seem to have overwhelmed the Newspaper of Record’s squadrons of copy…
La Cieca has just exited the season preview for the Met’s 08-09 season (no, she was not thrown out, she left of her own volition) and here’s what’s up.
The furore in New Zealand over Dame Kiri te Kanawa‘s apparent criticism of Kiwi popera divette Hayley Westenra may now be on a downward slope after peaking earlier this weekend.
The author, now viewed as an early feminist, based the plot on her own difficult experience with postpartum depression, which was then diagnosed as a nervous disorder curable only by a long period of bed rest, over-feeding and withdrawal from the world of family and friends. The character in the opera ends up going mad…
La Cieca was just recalling that soon after she arrived in New York back in 19-mumble-mumble, she screwed up her courage to audition for that most august of impresarios, Ira Siff of La Gran Scena Opera. Back in those days your doyenne thought she had what it took to be a great prima donna (including…
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